Some people don’t like phone security

It seems that FBI isn’t able to perform smudge attacks very well. Apparently, they have been defeated by Android’s “pattern lock” on a Samsung phone. Well, my friends must be smarter than the FBI, because both of the guys who tried to defeat my pattern lock using a smudge attack succeeded.

The fun part is of course that the FBI is now going after Google to find a solution to this problem, asking them plenty of information about the device and about the use that the bad guy did of it. Most of the things that they are requesting may indeed be in Google’s hands, if the bad guy is not very smart: e-mails, text messages, Web history, contacts, etc. Unless of course, the bad guy has been using non-default apps.

But it gets even more interesting when we get to the part asking for “Verbal and/or written instructions for overriding the ‘pattern lock’ installed on the” phone. Since this is a Samsung phone, does Google have this information? What if there is no way to override this? I am not sure that the people who design security protocols for Trusted Execution Environments and/or for Secure Elements actually include a backdoor everywhere. After all, in some cases, not having a backdoor makes security easier to enforce. Of course, in this particular case, the pattern lock can be overridden by the owner’s Google account, so I guess that Google has the information.

But, in a more general term, it brings us back to the question of the “right” security level. If there is an open market for TEE/SE applications, the “superlock” application definitely sounds like a good one. It will certainly benefit our privacy, and it will just as certainly annoy anybody who wants to violate someone’s privacy, with the same debates as usual regarding the limits of the law. I am not completely sure where I stand on this, since I don’t like the idea of letting police look at my information, but I don’t really like the idea that my wonderful security products are used by bad guys to protect their content from police Of course, we can trust most bad guys to be like regular guys and make blatant security mistakes, but sometimes, it just won’t work. Oh well, we’ll see, and it should be interesting.